Where does the time go? Summer used to last for a year. Now it is gone before i know it. Used to be we were on the outside of the record,* on a long slow lazy arc, and now we are on the inner track and it is going around faster and faster... I don't know what to do about it either. But we can live to be 115, so we aren't hardly middle aged...

(* record... round, vinyl, a disc of polyvinyl chloride plastic, engraved on both sides with a single concentric spiral groove in which a sapphire or diamond needle, stylus, is intended to run, from the outside edge towards the centre)

Unfortunately, it's now too close to a cultural, popular image of the time that's too evocative of Susan Atkins. Despite the lack of cable TV and the internet/web then, even then there was this phenomenon of dripping pop culture/pop news culture with the ability to imprint folks with image filters that might/can last for a lifetime.

That picture is creepy, not because it's of you, Althouse, but because it's now just of a type, which allows it to be easily confused with other specific symbolic imagery of the era.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.

Althouse herself, at an earlier time anyway, explicitly disavowed sentiment, sentimentalism, sentimentality--you know, all that jazz. And she's followed through, for the most part.

Just for fun, I'm inclined to view these posting-pictures-of-me entries as teasers, as playful bait, as the equivalent of a beautiful 19-year-old running through a field of daisies knowing how enticing that is to onlookers.

Wow. This is so different from the student one. I don't know what it is, but you look like you and LInda Blair are about to run away from home to the Manson Family Ranch with Leslie Van Houten. (I'm kidding obviously).

OK, the roses were redder and low back pain was nonexistent back then. But for all that, a wish to be governed by Norman Mailer was its own kind of hell....My enemy grows older and no longer has the energy and inventiveness to cause me much harm.

Let me flaunt my nerd credentials and point out: your analogy is wrong, an LP turns at a constant RPM, so that as you get to the inner grooves, the angular velocity remains the same but the linear velocity is lower. It's the newfangled... re, I mean obsolete CD that turns faster for the inner tracks.

But now it occurs to me, maybe yours is correct after all: we are the ones moving slower, so that everything else seems speeded up by comparison.

And I agree with Reliapundit. Kiss your husband, Mrs Meade. He has made you younger than Springtime.

You seem to be having a problem with 60 (Hey, when I hit 50, the lyrics of September Song kept bouncing around in my head). Night2night is right, though. It's a number and better than the alternative. I'm in a position where I have to remind The Blonde of that - she's had a rough Thanksgiving.

Looking forward is the thing. And with a light heart.

PS It wasn't all the girls that looked alike. It was all the people - male and female - who aspired to hippiedom. Funny how Leftism requires lockstep.

Yikes! I was a hot-shot 26 yr old fighter pilot Capt in the USAF stationed in the UK, fresh from a combat tour in Vietnam at that time--what a difference 6 years makes when one is young...now?....Ann and I--save for the difference of our sexes--are virtually indistinguishable (roughly speaking) in lifestyle, dress, out-look and comportment. We're all pretty much slouching toward that same oblivion. Now life--at this age--is more about "get by" than "world's to conquer."

In many ways things are just getting good. I turn 62 in a couple of months and we're adopting an infant in just a few weeks. Crappy nappies aren't for everyone in their 60s, but heck, what am I gonna do in my 60s? Write shitty poetry and work on my golf game?

Besides, all spring I have to get up three times a night to check on five large greenhouses full of baby flowers. Feeding and changing a kid is a barely noticeable addition to that task.